Zenescope - Omnibusted #44: Myths & Legends Volume Three (Beauty & The Beast)

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Omnibeaster.

The Month Of Love 2026 rolls dysfunctionally onward, Ticketholders!

It's been awhile since I did one of these Myths & Legends Volumes (The Little Mermaid last April, preceded by Little Red Riding Hood in November 2024), so you may not remember that, aside from the sixth and seventh issues (shut up, fellow kids!) being part of The Dream Eater Saga, the series so far has been an anthology of sequels to popular early issues of the Grimm Fairy Tales series, as well as a replacement for the canceled Grimm Tales ongoing series that would have starred Samantha Darren. As sequels, each Volume has featured a reprint of their original issue(s) as bonus material for those who wish to catch up and avoid (or be reminded of) as much continuity whiplash as possible. If it wasn't obvious enough, the third Volume of Myths & Legends is a sequel series to the two-part Beauty & the Beast Collection.

Grimm Fairy Tales

Myths & Legends Volume Three

Beauty & The Beast

The cover used for this Volume is the B Cover for Myths & Legends #13 by Pasquale Qualano and Ivan Nunes, and the Table Of Contents background (split into two pages in the digital edition and cyanotyped and cropped) is from the same issue's A Cover by Ale Garza and Sanju Nivangune. And speaking of covers, in the digital edition (unless we're talking about those with a 3.14159 rating—if you know, you know, and I apologize for the constant, irrational puns), the Trade Paperback has special title pages edited into its blue-and-white color scheme, even for the reprinted classic issues...but they're not in the positions they should be (in place of their respective issues' cover and credits pages), they're all shoved together in the back to be forgotten or ignored. And they shouldn't be; I enjoy seeing effort like this (even if a printing error did make it past the editor's discerning eye—sarcasm intended) getting the up-front recognition it deserves.

In the previous Volumes' reviews, I included my reprinted reviews of the reprinted issue(s) before I got into the Volume itself, as though they were separate entities. But as the Month Of Love is about togetherness and Zenescope's version of Beauty and the Beast has enough relationship toxicity to go around, I'm changing it up and being more inclusive about my composition. So here FROM September 8, 2017 (GFT Retrospective #14: The Beauty & The Beast Collection) AND December 14, 2022 (Countdown to TixMas #2 / Zenescope - Omnibusted #5: Grimm Fairy Tales TPB Volume 3) is the Collection that led to where we are now.

GFT #13 & 14: The Beauty and the Beast Collection

Jenna’s boyfriend, Drew, is angry and jealous, and frequently abuses her, but she stays with him because she sees the good in him (even though he’s a white boy who wears his baseball cap sideways and his bedroom looks like a rat’s nest). Sela approaches Jenna at a bar and has her read Beauty and the Beast.

There are no musical numbers, no talking furniture, and there is no Gaston to cast in the villain role. It’s a tale as old as unrequited Stockholm Syndrome, a song as old as “I didn’t mean to! It was an accident!”
Edmund (a stretch on the name Andrew, I guess?) is the prince-turned-Beast, and Jesabel (because Jenna and Belle, get it?) is the woman he takes in and nurses back to health.
When she is healthy enough to leave his castle and return to her fiance, the Beast flies into a jealous rage and kills everyone who could stand in the way of his love for her. But because of this (and because Jesabel didn’t love him to begin with), Edmund ensures that he will never have true love and is doomed to be the Beast forever (which has interesting thematic parallels to Wilhelm's backstory in Sinbad).

In the first part of this two-issue arc, Jenna decides (because she only reads half of the story) to cheat on Drew, her own personal Beast, with a co-worker named Steve.

This leads into part two, where Drew has almost given into rage and decided to kill Steve, but having taken Sela’s book from Jenna, he reads the story to the end and, rather than trying to control his Beastly side, takes his own life to prevent himself from killing Jenna.

As in a few past issues, Sela laments her ineffectiveness as a counselor and savior, in part criticizing her charges for not valuing their lives enough to make the right choice. This marks the first time two issues have been devoted to the same title, and the first time the reader(s) did not show signs of being sucked into the book. Jenna at one point expresses that she is simply reading a really captivating story. Drew looks sort of dazed in the few panels after he finishes reading, but that isn’t really explained in the lettering.
Beauty and the Beast is a roughly drawn but beautifully colored pair of issues, and will have some consequences in distant issues to come.

Before I get into the Myths & Legends continuation, I'd like to talk about a few things that I glossed over or didn't notice when I wrote my original review as you saw it here, starting with the covers and art. The A Covers for both issues (and most of the early Grimm Fairy Tales issues) were drawn by the late Al Rio and colored by Thomas Mason. The interior art was drawn by Tommy Castillo (who also drew and colored the B Cover for Part One, which was used for its special title page in the Trade Paperback) and colored by Mark McNabb. It presents more as a consistent art style between the two parts of the story than among the Grimm Fairy Tales series as a whole, but the diagonal, slash-like panel margins fit The Beast well. Note also that the title pages refer to both parts as Grimm Fairy Tales #13, which is an obvious typo.

As for things I missed, it didn't register to me until now that the woman who cursed Edmund might be a pre-Fear Not Belinda (because purple robes and washed-out red hair verging on brunette). Her phrasing in this story is somewhat heroic and moralizing (hence why I think it's Belinda prior to joining the Dark Horde) despite having a vindictive nature with respect to male authority figures (like Belinda did). Granted, we also see Jesabel in purple robes in Part Two, but I'm chalking that up to a limited color palette. Then there's the sinister face with glowing, red eyes that appears on the spine of Sela’s book at the end. I don't know if Zenescope were still trying to flesh out the book's powers, it was an artistic liberty/oversight, or it was meant to reflect Sela’s dejected, mysanthropic attitude influencing her connection to the Book Of Provenance, but it certainly looks cool.

Chapter One/Issue #12 picks up right after the Collection left off, revealing as a retcon for the sole purpose of having this arc exist at all, that the late, now-faceless Drew Pierce had an older brother named Edward (a.k.a. "The Prince Of New York," a.k.a. "The Beast," so we can probably assume the Beauty & The Beast tale from Sela's book was about Edward's past Falseblood life, hence why Jenna didn't have a metaphysical experience while reading and Drew appeared to only be slightly affected by the book) who gave him the stupid-looking hat he wore and left him with their stereotypically abusive father and background image of a mother. Meanwhile to this poster-family of trickledown domestic crimes and unnecessary erasure of the self, Edward grew up to become a ruthless, successful Wall Street tycoon with a life of high-end prostitutes, luxury goods, and his own history of domestic violence (or is it? Edward keeps having fugue experiences of indulging his wrathful side in public that scream more of American Psycho influences in the writing than the typical, "carried to a life of opulence by a demonic bargain" scenario that characters like him go through in this Universe). We're meant to sympathize with him, I think, as the passage of time forces him to move back into his childhood home to care for his dying father (who is still an asshole). That is, until we learn that he:

1. Abandoned his brother (because he thought Drew would "drag him down" if they escaped together) to daily physical and psychological abuse,
2. Didn't respond to Drew's call for help on the day he killed himself, on account of being "too busy" (watching the stock market and having threesomes with hookers),
3. Swore revenge against Jenna for causing Drew's death instead of taking responsibility for not being there when his kid brother needed him, and
4. Threw his father's pills out the window and watched him die (illustrating the difference between understandable and justifiable).

What's less understandable (I'm talking to you, cover artist Romano Molenaar!) is what in the Uncanny Valley of Fuck is up with Jenna's face...if that's even supposed to be Jenna? And her Street Fighter V-ass hair? And the weird game of "Flesh Or Leather?" we have to play with her impractical winter bikini armor outfit? I mean, I know that I'm in the audience demographic...kinda, and that as a straight man (what socially ignorant grade-schoolers from thirty years ago would have called "a lesbian trapped in a male body"), I'm expected to somehow use my eyes independently from my brain, but...damn this picture is fugly and makes even less sense than this AI-generated-looking snow-hooker would earn on the average streetcorner. Homophones! And puns!

Sorry; I promised that I would talk about this Volume in a spirit of love and ended up filing the exact opposite in triplicate. I think The Beast is getting the better of me, so let's get back to the story.

Half of this issue is just Edward monologuing internally about how he has a constant urge to hurt and/or kill everyone around him (like he's Dexter and The Beast is his Dark Passenger or something) because he's grieving and their happiness pisses him off so much (we're supposed to sympathize with the ruthless, violent, mentally unstable, patricidal billionaire, remember?) that he beats an entire bar full of people half to death (one of whom calls him "brah," so...understandable but not justifiable again?) and pays off the owner.

Meanwhile to Edward being Edward, we see that Jenna and Steve (who is a mildly successful mechanic now) are a happy couple, and that Steve also wears a baseball cap at a dumbass, wigga-ass angle because Jenna has a type, I guess. This doesn't last very long, though, because Edward has spent the past four weeks having Jenna's life investigated so he could buy the local bank, foreclose on Jenna's parents' home, murder the private investigators he hired before they could double-cross him, and bludgeon Steve into a coma. Yeah; Edward sure is a prince among men....

That isn't to say his process isn't compelling; his scorched Earth approach to revenge is something I might even call impressive if I were of a Machiavellian persuasion, and he reminds me of a Dean Koontz villain. And the pop culture/public domain influences in the writing of his character here start to skew less Patrick Bateman than Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as temporarily satisfying his homicidal rage (the description of which has a very "Yoda explains the path to the Dark Side" cadence to it that made me chuckle despite the intended tone) triggers the beginning of a very hairy, primal transformation.

You may recognize two of the shown covers here because they were used for this Volume's cover and the Table Of Contents background. And you can probably tell from the credits page of this issue (Zenescope wouldn't get super-crazy with the variant covers and start hiding the "rare" convention art for a few more years at this point, only reserving large amounts of covers for milestone and Launch issues) that the special title page isn't adapted from a cover. It's actually the last page of the issue with Jenna cropped out, so spoilers for Edward going full Beast at the end?

Nothing much different happens this issue besides an increase in spectacle and gore. Edward is Legally Distinct Sabretooth for the majority of the issue, dressing like the Unabomber to remain inconspicuous in a post-9/11 world while he explodes Steve into an armless meat-skeleton and tricks Jenna into coming home to her tortured and disemboweled parents. Thankfully (even though she watched her ex-boyfriend remove his own face with one right next to her), Steve bought her a gun when they moved in together, because Edward is apparently one of those Falsebloods who derive power from the blood, souls, and negative emotions of the innocent, and Jenna's parents were just enough to bring The Beast the rest of the way out.

And now that Edward is fully The Beast, he's no longer just Legally Distinct Sabretooth; he's Legally Distinct Sabre-Jugger-Hulk. We're talking a healing factor that lets him wake up from fatal gunshots (like Jenna tapping him between the eyes), an immunity to magical items and mind control (after he slaughters the responding police and escapes into the woods, Baba Yaga is there and tries to control him and trap him in the Cyclops Eye, neither of which affect him because he's too in tune with his own fury), and an untameable rage. And now that the final showdown for the arc has ended on an anti-climax, it's time for the dense, retroactive exposition dump! Apparently, because Sela was an asset of Belinda's at the time, she left a rose in Drew's room that would have acted as a conduit to turn him into The Beast, but he never found it and ended up doing what he did instead.

Baba Yaga (who is delivering this exposition dump) tells Edward that the Horde didn't know he even existed. Uh; Witch‽ Can't you see the future‽ I mean, it's easy to write this off as Baba Yaga withholding information from the Horde because she foresaw this particular moment and wanted to claim The Beast for herself, but then she seems genuinely shocked when he denies her (Witch; you're supposed to be able to see the future!) and again when he shrugs off being sucked into the Cyclops Eye (like using a basic Pokéball on an over-leveled Legendary with full HP). I guess Baba Yaga's foresight may fall into the category of "magic that The Beast is too angry to be affected by," but she was still able to find exactly where he was so this exposition dump could happen, so this sequence doesn't make sense because Witch can see the future!

Speaking of supernatural rage, though, it's now time for the obligatory cliffhanger that will never be followed up on, because Jenna becomes a magic psychic rage virus focused on killing The Beast.

The End?

I liked how Jenna said everything I had been thinking throughout this review, how sadistic and thorough of a villain Edward was, and how we got a compelling human interest psychological thriller that didn't end with Samantha bursting a blood vessel over her failure as the Guardian Of the Nexus again (because Samantha wasn't in this arc, aside from a few fanservice exclusive covers here and there). It was rather refreshing.

I don't recall the final stinger ever being followed up on, but The Beast will pop up again in future issues, and in 2018, Zenescope would introduce Belle (not to be confused with the Neverland character). I haven't read a Belle comic yet, so I don't know if she has any connection with Jenna, but I will get to her in time.

Until then, please Stay Tuned and remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read because feeding The Beast costs money, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content, like tomorrow's TBT '26 push of a HeroMachine character whose backstory I plan to Redeux next week.

109

Omnibeaster,

Out.